Searoad

One of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most realistic works, Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand is also among her most inventive. A series of interconnected stories set in a small vacation town off the coast highway in Oregon, this contemporary classic paints a vivid and powerfully evocative portrait of Klatsand’s residents and the community they build over the course of a century. Some have deep roots in the village, while others have come for just a weekend, but all are pilgrims subject to inexpressible longings.

The women in these stories craft their own narratives separate from the men in their lives. In “Hand, Cup, Shell,” an interviewer becomes more interested in the wife, daughter, and granddaughter of a famous scholar than in the man himself. “True Love” follows a librarian summering in Klatsand who indulges in an affair with a man but finds a deeper connection with his other lover. And in the novella “Hernes,” four generations of women in a single family raise their daughters alone, from Fanny, a twice-widowed pioneer who first settles in Klatsand with her children, to Virginia, whose husband cannot understand her desire for a career as a poet.

A deeply textured response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, this unforgettable book plumbs some of the most abiding themes in Le Guin’s writing: the relationships between mothers and daughters, the nature of women’s work, and the lives of artists.